Life

What You Think About After Riding a Fat Bike In An IRONMAN

Ostendorf, front, with her training buddies (left) and with Cossack at IRONMAN Florida (right).

Three weeks after IRONMAN Florida and 12 years since her first IRONMAN, Vicki Ostendorf reflects on how riding a fat bike renewed her passion for triathlon as both an athlete and a coach.

by David Landers

Unlike its zippy TT cousin, a fat bike features oversized tires filled to a low pressure, perfect for soft surfaces like snow. It was just this kind of bike that Vicki Ostendorf—an IRONMAN University coach and founder of the private studio Tri-Fitness near St. Paul, MN—rode 112 miles at IRONMAN Florida earlier this month.

Though there’s no snow, just hard and hot concrete, on the IRONMAN Florida bike course, Ostendorf easily cruised into T2 on 4.5-inch-wide tires with a time of 6:52:35. She later crossed the finish line in 14 hours.

Try something crazy

It was a year ago that Dave Cossack, one of Ostendorf's long-time training buddies and owner of Sak’s Sports Bar, first floated the idea of doing an IRONMAN on a fat bike.

"This sounds crazy," Ostendorf said at the time, and she turned Cossack down. A couple of months passed, and Ostendorf heard through the local triathlon grapevine that as many as eight different people had rejected Cossack’s offer. So, when Cossack asked again, Ostendorf accepted … with conditions.

Along with the investments of money (Ostendorf adjusted her yearly training budget to purchase her first fat bike) and time (Ostendorf adjusted her plans for 2017 to accommodate training commitments), agreeing to ride a fat bike at IRONMAN Florida demanded faith in the friendship. "If I sign up for this," Ostendorf remembers telling Cossack, "we will do this event together, and we will train together. And he said 'absolutely.'"

The opportunity to take race an IRONMAN in a new way with a trusted friend, absent normal competitive pressures, was appealing to Ostendorf. "That was the most important thing. This whole fat bike thing was not my idea,” she explains. “If I was going to do it, I wanted to do it because we were doing it as friends, not as competitors.”

"That was the most important thing. This whole fat bike thing was not my idea,” she explains. “If I was going to do it, I wanted to do it because we were doing it as friends, not as competitors.”

Through the spring and summer, Ostendorf and Cossack trained together every weekend. They rode hills to prepare for wind on the course. They did race-day scenario-planning. They negotiated who would start the bike leg and who would set the pace. And their efforts paid off, with them both completing IRONMAN Florida.

And the friendship now? “I would say it is absolutely stronger since finishing the race together. I will continue to give him a lot of grief for talking me into this, but it’s all in jest. I would have had that experience in no other way.”

Put the fun back in the process

As a personal trainer and IRONMAN University coach, Ostendorf has always told her athletes that triathlon training works best as a mix of structure and play. Data analysis, training plans and races, however, often dominate a triathlete’s season, and Ostendorf says that she sometimes thinks rigidly about training: it needs to follow a fixed timeline with defined stages to meet a specific goal.

With the experience in Florida fresh in her mind, Ostendorf now aims to help her athletes have more fun with the sport.

"I can look at my athletes and approach training differently," says Ostendorf. "If you want to Kona qualify, we have to get some work done right. But it should be about having fun because we spend a whole lot of time doing it. This doesn't have to be a grind all of the time.'

Go fat and get ... faster?

That new approach to training includes encouraging her athletes to add fat bikes to their training regimens.

Leading up to IRONMAN Florida, Ostendorf trained exclusively on her fat bike. "That was hard for me because I felt like I struggled all spring and all summer riding. I felt so slow all of the time."

Then, for a race in July, Ostendorf clipped into her time trial bike—the only time she would do so before IRONMAN Florida. Accustomed to training on the slower and heavier fat bike, she had no idea what to expect.

"And that day, I averaged at least a mile and a half per hour faster," she explains, "with the same amount of effort. I felt like my bike performance improved because of the fat bike."

While Ostendorf says that triathletes must experiment to find the right ratio of time riding a fat bike and riding a road bike, she believes a fat bike is a useful training tool.

It’s not all about the PB

"In the many years I've done endurance sports, it's always been about the competition," she says. "It’s always about the win." At the start of a new season, Ostendorf always found herself asking how much faster she could go at that race, how much better could she be this year, and what else was needed to keep improving.

IRONMAN Florida offered a new mindset entirely.

"It brought me back to my first IRONMAN," Ostendorf explains. "The race in Florida was interesting because, like my first IRONMAN, I had no expectations. I didn't even know what I was doing, outside of knowing that I had to swim 2.4 miles, bike 112 miles, and run a marathon. I didn't even know that there were time cut-offs," she says. "I was going at it completely blind, but it was super fun."

Her fat bike race reminded Ostendorf that having fun and trying something new with others is at the core of IRONMAN.

"We still wanted to race strong, and we were going to get it done," she says. "But it was so much more than that."

David Landers is a freelance writer with a passion for triathlon and travel. He lives in Vancouver, B.C.